Kim Fay

My novel in progress, In Yellow Babylon, made it into the Top 100 of Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Competition. Part of getting that far meant receiving a review from Publishers Weekly. The following is from that review:

"Atmospheric, lyrical, and written in almost painfully beautiful prose, this historical novel sings like a coloratura soprano performing in a gorgeous opera ... Irene, the protagonist, loses her mother as a young girl. She tries to fill the yawning void that loss created with a dream of adventure. The grail she seeks at the encouragement of her mentor, a wealthy temple-looter named Mr. Simms, is a set of long-lost Cambodian scrolls that explain the mysterious fall of the Khmer and their once-glorious kingdom at Angkor Wat. There is symbolic significance here---Irene's childhood "kingdom" was ripped apart by the loss of her mother---but she is not maudlin or sentimental, nor is this novel. As a twenty-nine-year old living in revolutionary Shanghai, Irene plans her Cambodian quest in an atmosphere of contrasts---languor and violence, wealth and poverty, virtue and dissipation. Midway through the novel, she finally sets out. Accompanying her are Simone, a Sanskrit-reading femme fatale; Louis, Simone's once-and-future fiance; and Marc, a bar proprietor and love interest ... the author's evocation of the setting and the foreign misfits that inhabited it is nothing short of magical; the prose, extraordinary."

The competition and review also landed me a wonderful agent, and she and I are in the process of refining the book. Our goal is to have it ready to send to editors in February 2010.